What is your Offer Approval Process?
Are you ready to make an offer to your top candidate? It can be a pretty exciting moment, especially when you consider how much time you and your hiring team have spent reviewing work samples, conducting interviews, and vetting top choices. But before you make the offer, have you followed the steps of the offer approval process?
4 Steps to the Offer Approval Process
Before you make your formal job offer, keep the following four steps of the offer approval process in mind:
- Defining the offer
- Contacting others for feedback and final input
- Creating the official offer letter
- Sending the offer letter to the applicant
Below, we’ve broken down some of what’s involved in each step, along with ways you can use your ATS during the process.
If you’ve been using an applicant tracking system (ATS) throughout the hiring process, then you what an important organizing tool it can be.
It can serve as a central hub for adding, accessing, and sharing information about candidates, right up through making an offer. You can continue to rely on your ATS when it comes to your offer approval process.
Here’s a breakdown of some of what’s involved in each of the four offer approval steps, and how your ATS can help you stay organized:
1. Define the offer
This step may seem self-explanatory, but it’s worth mentioning as a reminder. As we said above, you might have been working with a salary range all along. You might have even shared this range in your job post, or directly with candidates.
Now is the time to revisit any research about salaries and benefits for similar positions in your market and industry. As you do, you can review your ATS for notes you might have written about your top candidate, or about other candidates as it relates to fulfilling the requirements of the job opening.
2. Contact others for feedback and final input
First, consider the members of your hiring team. Who else met with your top candidate? What was their feedback? You can circle back with these interviewers, and gather their thoughts on the candidate. Your ATS can help you organize and sort through feedback you received along the way.
And of course, HR and hiring managers will want to connect with senior leaders, as well as the accounting department, especially when it’s time to finalize the salary and benefits package. Do you think you’ll need to bump the salary a bit? Is flex scheduling on the table? What will it take to get your top candidate to say yes, especially in our competitive hiring environment?
3. Create the offer letter
Some job offers happen in person. Others take place during a brief phone call. But almost every job offer will include an offer letter, which spells out the complete offer in detail.
Many companies use a legally reviewed template job offer letter that hiring managers can access from a file server. Using your ATS can make it easy to find information you’ll want to add into the job offer letter (such as job title, responsibilities, and even things you and the candidate may have discussed during interviews).
4. Send the offer letter to the applicant
As we mentioned above, while you might make the offer by phone, or in person, sending the letter is a key moment in the process.
For starters, the letter can provide the candidate with a timeline for when you’ll need to hear back. This can be anywhere from a couple of days, to a week, or even longer, depending on the position, and the candidate’s current work situation.
As the target date approaches, you’ll want the candidate to either agree to the offer, or follow up to discuss various terms.
Using your ATS, you can set a reminder to alert you when it’s time to circle back with your candidates, assuming you haven’t heard from them first.
Stay organized during the offer approval process
An organized offer approval process is another way to stay focused, and keep your hiring workflow as efficient as possible. Even if your company decided on a salary and benefits package weeks ago, keep these steps in mind before you call your top candidate to say “you’re hired!”
